Don't Be the Worst: The Enthusiasm Problem

Nerd girls are hot. Nerd men are hot. People with cassette fetishes and basement museums now get book deals and "This American Life" episodes instead of swirlies. The word has gone from opprobrium to come-on to something that might be proudly proclaimed via provocatively shrunken spaghetti strap top.

But I’m going to go off the convention-center reservation here and say something wildly unpopular: Not all nerdery is created equally erotic.

I don’t mean physically. We all know the difference between a hot comic book collection and a terrifically unsexy comic book collection is the collector. But sometimes it’s the collection itself that’s sexy or unsexy. I don’t mean that in the sense of whether or not it has the "Red Hulk" run. (BARF! Right, ladies?) I mean that in the sense of what you nerd out about, and indeed, how hard you nerd out.

A nerd, for me, is somebody who’s really into a particular thing. Not somebody who wears chunky glasses. A nerd is a zealot. And as a card-carrying genetic female, whether or not a zealot can be palatably made love to is based on one of a few factors. As there are more than 100 subspecies of lemur on Madagascar, so are there myriad phyla of nerds. So first:

1. What’s Your Obsession?

The audiophile used to be one of the sole sexually acceptable dorketypes, but thanks to the Food Network and precious online literary journals and the fact that attractive people are now allowed into DragonCon, more types of nerdery have become acceptable material for online dating profiles. Many of us find it sexy to love cartoons and Spider-Man and that thing where Japanese people make food look like pandas.

But—putting aside the obvious un-hot manias (trains, weather, those people who actually fall in love with fences)—some hobbies are just not good for scoring.

Like, obviously anything that brushes too closely to Death. Serial killers. Weapons. Actual Dead Things. Once, a very hot girl who groped me at a party turned out to be really into taxidermy. I know this because the second thing she did when she met me was mash her boobs against me and say, "I’m really into taxidermy." (Brooklyn!) She went from "hot" to "might kill me with a dirty tibia" in a few, actually pretty terrifying seconds.

Also: anything that is less a dynamic category (Italian horror movies, rap, discontinued cereals) and actually just kind of a noun (brooms). When I recently read Oliver Sacks’ borderline pornographic New Yorker essay about ferns, I was like, "Wow, I thought Oliver Sacks was a foxy bearded neurologist, but now I think he kind of wants to put it in a fern." (I’m sorry. I know. I’ve ruined your secret Oliver Sacks crush.) This goes doubly for any kind of animal. I bet Jonathan Franzen got laid so much after The Corrections, but the general sentiment of most heterosexual women that I know after reading Freedom was, "Enough about the motherfucking birds."

But while it’s sometimes the fetish that’s sexy (food, music, cocktails) or unsexy (improv, ventriloquism), sometimes it’s the level of the enthusiast’s enthusiasm that is, in itself, the turn off. See, please:

2. How Into It Are You?

Let’s use food as an example. Food nerdery can be taken too far. I don’t want to be all Real Journalists vs. Online Everymen about it, because I think that particular topic has hit the paywall (ka-zing!), but man, the Internet has made everybody annoying. Everybody is literally a critic. This is a bad date in 1991: "Wow, this portabella mushroom cap is dry." This is a bad date in 2011: "Bloggity bloggity blog, chanterelles bloggity blog blog local farm blog blog minus one star for bottled Sriracha." Here’s a fun game. Try going on Yelp and guessing what people are like in bed based on their reviews. Omar S. used the term "mouthfeel" in a discussion of a taco cart. I’m guessing he gives terrible head.

The problem here is being too into something. It’s weird! It’s important not to display too much of your -philia to somebody you’re hoping to attract. I know a lot of girls who would find a deep and abiding love for protopunk sexy, but if you can say things like, "Richard Hell is a Libra" then I’m going to suggest you don’t. Be an enthusiast, not an obsessive. (If obsession lies between love and madness, then let us say that enthusiasm lies between "obsession" and "love." Between obsession and madness? Fan fiction.)

Consider your encyclopedic knowledge of your enthusiasm as its bathing suit area. It is just for you, or for private times at home with people from an Internet message board. Speaking of being on an internet message board at 4 a.m.:

3. What Do You Do for a Living?

I don’t mean this derisively, like, "You work at Waldenbooks, what do you know about antique medical equipment?" (Answer: EVERYTHING.) I mean this in a "If you like it so much why don’t you marry it?" sense. I think it’s a red flag to women if you’re one of those people who works in data processing and only comes alive when talking about a rare kind of illegal Spanish ham. We all know those kinds of enthusiasts, and its flummoxing to watch somebody love something so much and still not do anything about it.

To me, if you love the Civil War to the point of getting half-mast at the sound of a harmonica, and you aren’t a teacher or an author or at least volunteering at some kind of reenactment village, something is amiss. Why aren’t you following your crazy passion to its logical conclusion? Write the book. Learn to drum. Do the stage. Work at an arboretum. Put a ring on it.

If that’s not an option for you? Just dial it back a little bit. Have your "thing," don’t let your "thing" have you.

Well, okay, you might be saying to yourself, but I have all this fern marginalia in my head. How do you un-know knowledge? Well, I can’t remember the ending of Big Fish. Because I was high on marijuana. Just putting that out there.

Ultimately, I want you to know that I’m not hating on collectors and hobbyists and fetishizers. I certainly have my little peccadilloes. (I collect eyeglasses and love movies where ghosts have families.) Even if you’re guilty of some of the things I’ve described above, I don’t necessarily want you to stop. We need people like you, people who can still feel feelings. Many of our childhood passions went with our milk teeth. I’m just trying to get you laid! Knowing the names of every episode of "The Simpsons" is great, but it’s much nicer when you have somebody misquoting them to correct.

Julieanne Smolinski AKA Boobs Radley is a writer who has been in a monogamous relationship with the Internet since 1993. She tweets here.

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